A blog post on my New Zealand secondment

25 April 2018 - Khetam Al Sharou (Early Stage Researcher, UCL)

As an early stage researcher, I have relished any opportunity to participate in research and academic activities to build upon the valuable communicative and research skills I have developed so far. Becoming a member of the UCL INTERACT team working in cooperation with other partners on Crisis translation adds to this endeavour to widen my knowledge and experience in language-related research. My participation in this project was a personal research milestone which started when I got the opportunity to be hosted as an academic visitor by the University of Auckland, New Zealand. It is a high profile and important issue in today’s globalized but fractured society where crises are occurring with unpredictable frequency and scale. One of the main focuses of this project is ‘to enhance human skills, competences and cross-sectoral collaboration across academic, humanitarian, and industrial sectors involved in crisis translation’. The role of translators in such circumstances is often indispensable and cannot be neglected. This project encompasses ideas and topics of interest to me first as a translation researcher and second as a Syrian with a personal connection to the ongoing crisis in my homeland which forced Syrian people to become refugees in almost every country in the world. The least I can do is to make contribution to a research project which might help in a way in this crisis and similar other crises in the future see affected people and their relatives to receive reliable information.

My participation in this project was a personal research milestone which started in style with a fantastic research adventure over the other side of the world. My contribution commenced when I got the opportunity to be hosted as an academic visitor by the University of Auckland, New Zealand. The two-month secondment was the first trip outside Europe for this year. It followed the few trips I had made in the second part of 2017 to Slovenia and Italy and my research contribution at University of Ljubljana and Catania University supported by Erasmus+. However, I can say my trip to NZ was different and a big step forward in my career as a researcher and a culture discoverer.

Living currently in the UK, the trip to NZ sounded to me as if I would be traveling from a freezing cold world to another shiny and bright world, but when I arrived, I felt I just landed in England AGAIN. Everything seemed familiar: people spoke perfect English, drove on the left and spent money with the Queen’s face on them! Leave alone the few coincidences happened there by visiting the Hobbiton village and seeing exact copy of UK landscapes, accompanying my host Kiwi family who tried very hard to convince me to try NZ wine, but I was not thirsty enough to fall into their temptation! Attending the famous British comedy show (Mrs Brown’s boys) which I always wanted to watch live was another unplanned incident. It only happened because my landlady was too ill to go so I had to replace her – the sacrifices one does for research. Everything was almost designed to make NZ a place which I could confidently call ‘HOME’.

My time at UoA was very fruitful and productive and the hosts at UoA were super supportive. They did their best to facilitate my stay in NZ in a way made that my work on a project on crisis translation be anything except A CRISIS. The activities varied in their nature and objectives reflecting the essence of the project which aims to bring people from different bodies, research backgrounds, and in various countries cooperating to achieve the objectives of this unique project. It was a mixed experience for me during which I was a learner, a presenter, and a researcher.

While on secondment, I had the chance to participate in various events and activities during which I shared some of my work and research activities with a wider audience. I also got the chance to attend training events and seminars from which I have learnt a lot about different disciplines and their research questions. After experiencing the Kiwis’ cultural welcome, I relished these events as they directly contributed to honing my research skills and my understanding of interdisciplinary work, and to widening my educational experience and research profile.

The secondment was a platform for building my network of contacts outside Europe. A series of meetings were held with a number of scholars and researchers from similar and other disciplines who share the same research interests and visions. These meetings served as catalysts for the existing project to be further developed, and during which the foundations for its continuation and possibly new collaborative projects were laid.

‘Mission accomplished’ a phrase I would like to use to describe my trip to NZ regardless of the political connotation associated with it. I just want to make a point that not every mission can be described as accomplished unless in its essence it aims to spread peace, to narrow the gaps between the various cultures and make us come together and understand each other despite all the differences. That is some of what this project is trying to achieve. In New Zealand, I felt my secondment did exactly that and left me with a lot of anticipation from my next INTERACT travels to Portugal in a splendid Atlantic summer!